A CLOCKWORK MURDER: The Night A Twisted Fantasy Became A Demented Reality

by Steve Jackson

  Terri Brake had done her part to keep the wounds open. The defense lawyer had even contacted (through another lawyer) a mutual friend of the Luiszers to ask her to intercede and get them to request that the district attorney not pursue the death penalty. The friend hung up and called Peggy, who thought that the defense team had sunk about as far as it could go. But she was wrong there, too.

  During jury selection, Wilson had filed a motion to prohibit the Luiszers and their supporters from wearing the one-inch purple ribbons created in memory of Jacine for her memorial services. Nor did he want Peggy to carry the photograph of Jacine she’d brought with her for every hearing and Salmon’s trial. He also asked the judge to stop them from inserting earplugs during the worst of the testimony or from leaving the courtroom when the crime scene or autopsy photographs were shown. The ribbons, the photograph, and the earplugs and exits might “inflame the jury and undermine Woldt’s presumption of innocence.”

  Gordon Denison had filed a countermotion defending the family’s rights. U.S. case law and Colorado statutes protected crime victims’ rights inside the courtroom, he wrote. That meant “spectators must be permitted to wear what they wish, including earplugs, carry what they desire, and come and go as they please.”

  Denison wrote it was unlikely that the jurors would even notice the ribbons or, if they did, know the significance. He noted that the jury forewoman in the Salmon trial told the prosecutors that they did not see the ribbons or pay attention to what the Luiszers were doing.

  After Wilson filed his motion, Peggy had angrily addressed the media outside the courtroom. “He just doesn’t want us in the courtroom,” she said. “If his goal was to really upset us, he’s succeeded. I think he’s just doing it to tick us off.”

  At a hearing on the issue two days later, she’d fought the tears as she directed her ire at Wilson, who sat stone-faced at the defense table. “He’s being mean and vindictive,” she said. “We’ve gone through hell for the past three years, and he’s trying to put us through more.”

  Wilson shrugged it off. All the prosecutors had to do was agree to sentence Woldt to life in prison, he said. “We would like nothing more than to have the same sentence Lucas Salmon got, and we’d end this case today and end the Luiszers’ pain.”

  Peggy and Bob thought Wilson’s response was typical and sincerely doubted that he cared what they wore or did in the courtroom. The real purpose for his legal maneuvering was to beat them down and make them give up. It also showed how little he understood about what Jacine’s death meant to them, as if their pain would end just because the trials would be over. Their pain would last for the rest of their lives. What they wanted was justice for Jacine.

  Hall compromised. He decided that the jurors wouldn’t notice the one-inch ribbons and the Luiszers could continue to use their earplugs so long as they didn’t intentionally call attention to themselves when inserting or removing them. They could also enter and leave the courtroom, but he urged them to do so between witnesses so as not to pull the jurors’ concentration away from the testimony. However, Peggy would only be allowed to carry the photograph of Jacine after the jury returned with its verdict, he said.

  When the news of Wilson’s latest motion was reported in the Gazette, the community again reacted with outrage.

  “I just can’t believe the justice system here in Colorado Springs would allow the defense team for George Woldt to even contemplate the idea of forcing these poor parents to take control of their emotions during this trial,” a reader wrote.

  “So what’s next? Maybe they shouldn’t cry either? Why is it that the accused has more rights than the victim or the parents of the victim?”

  It was something Peggy and Bob Luiszer had often wondered themselves.

  Terribly hurt by the loss of their daughter, the Luiszers took no joy in the pain of the other parents who sat on the defense side of the courtroom. Peggy had been contacted by Bob Salmon, who seemed haunted by guilt as he told her about his son’s life in prison. “His father said Lucas wishes he’d done what he wanted to do and pleaded guilty and asked for the death penalty,” she told the Gazette. “He’s wishing he could just kill himself. … That gives me the willies.”

  Peggy had not forgiven Salmon after he apologized. But she’d felt he was sincere, at least until he was brought to court at the start of Woldt’s trial to testify against his former friend and he refused.

  The prosecutors thought that there was a chance he would take the stand. They’d offered him complete immunity so that nothing he said could later be used against him if his case was overturned on appeal. He’d seemed genuinely remorseful when he apologized to the Luiszers at his death-penalty hearing saying he would give his own life if it could have brought Jacine back. But then that was when the issue was whether the judges would spare his life, but now he was worried more about himself.

  Salmon was brought in, wearing shackles and seated in the jury box. He’d looked at the floor the entire time, shaking his head and mumbling “No” when asked by Hall if he would testify. He never looked at Woldt, who also stared straight ahead, as if his former partner in crime didn’t exist.

  Young requested that Hall force Salmon to testify. The convicted killer could reveal, he said, whether Woldt was suffering from a “brain malfunction” the night Jacine was murdered. “Mr. Salmon is the only surviving witness as to what happened to Jacine Gielinski, and he was with Mr. Woldt the whole time.”

  However, Jessica West, one of the new set of lawyers handling Salmon’s appeals, said her client feared that his testimony might be used against him despite the prosecution’s assurances. He was also worried that other prisoners would hear that he was a snitch and harm him in prison.

  Hall cited Salmon for contempt of court and added six months to his life sentence plus the 184 years for his other crimes. He was led out one door, the jury was brought in another, and the trial of George Woldt, who was neatly dressed, with every hair in place, continued.

  The women who’d witnessed the abduction were called again to the stand, the memories still vivid. The Morman missionaries testified about hearing the woman screaming for help and watching her be dragged across the parking lot. Margaret Zarate recounted seeing the dark-haired man, who she identified in court as George Woldt, hitting the woman in the face as he straddled her in the backseat. And then her terror as he looked at her three times.

  Then the police officers took the stand. Gregory Wilhelmi revisited the scene of the abduction and then later told of finding the bloody clothes and bloody knife in the trunk of Salmon’s car.

  Tom Heath recalled how after the knife was discovered and Salmon confessed, Woldt had asked to speak to him privately. The defendant had said that when the young woman pulled up next to them at the stoplight, Salmon had said, “She’s the one.” But that they had both decided after the rape that, because she had seen their faces, they could not let her go.

  After they’d taken turns raping her, stabbing her, and packing mud in her vagina, they’d driven around discussing their chances of still getting into heaven. Salmon, according to Woldt, accused him of making him participate because Woldt had talked so much about it. “He said they’d been following girls for about a week,” Heath testified.

  Woldt had been emotional and “shaking” when first confronted, Heath said. But as soon as he started to talk about the crime, he became calm and “very unemotional.” The only time he showed anything else was when he interrupted his recounting of the rape and murder to ask what was going to happen to his wife. When told that she would be all right, he calmed right down. “After that, it was like telling a story,” the officer testified. “There was no emotion at all.”

  Woldt’s lack of emotion was also noted on the stand by Detective Terry Bjomdahl, who recounted his interviews with the defendant on the morning following the murder. Throughout the interviews, the detective said, Woldt’s demeanor was matter-of-fact, lacking in emotion, which he thought was “amazing under the c
ircumstances.”

  He said Woldt told him that Salmon had indicated that they should follow the girl at the traffic light and the defendant said he replied, “Yeah, we’ll get you one.” They’d been following young women, Woldt told him, because Salmon was a virgin. The defendant said they’d followed at least four or five other women in the weeks leading up to Jacine’s murder.

  “Mr. Woldt seemed articulate, well-spoken, very in control,” Bjomdahl testified. He was also quite willing to write out his statement on paper, which the detective read parts of to the jury.

  ‘“She was still breathing so Lucas handed me the knife,’ ” the detective read as the jurors followed a transcription of the words on a projector screen. “ ‘I cut her throat as well. I quickly handed the knife back to Lucas and he said that he was going to stab it into her heart. I gave Lucas back the knife and he stabs her another time in the chest, I believe. By this point I was so terrified that my whole body was shaking because she was still alive.’ ”

  The police officers were followed to the stand by a parade of crime-scene technicians. When one began to describe for the jury what they were seeing in the gruesome photographs projected on a screen, George Woldt showed emotion for the first time in three years. With Jacine’s battered, bloody body before him, he turned away and began to cry. His lawyers had to ask the judge to excuse the jury so that their client could compose himself.

  This time, the judge did not allow the prosecution to show the crime-scene videotape that had reduced Salmon’s defense attorney, Lauren Cleaver, to tears. Hall said it unnecessarily duplicated the crime-scene photographs.

  However, the prosecution won the right to use Salmon’s statements against Woldt. Heher protested the evidence, saying that Salmon’s confession was self-serving and contradicted Woldt’s own confession. Among his points: Salmon claimed the abduction, rape, and murder of a young woman were planned as much as a month earlier after watching A Clockwork Orange, but Woldt contended it was not planned in advance; Salmon said Amber Gonzales was struck intentionally, while Woldt claimed it was an accident; they disagreed over who saw Jacine first and whose idea it was to kill her.

  But Zook said the prosecution needed the statements to cross-examine the defense’s mental health experts, as well as Woldt’s own self-serving confession. The judge sided with the prosecution.

  Laura Shugart, the barmaid at the pool hall, appeared, as did Amber Gonzales, each pointing to the defendant as the man they recognized from their encounters with him on April 29, 1997.

  Then the jury heard from the dead when the videotape of Derrick Ayers was played. He told them how he and Woldt had been best friends and spent a lot of time together in the spring and summer of 1996. Woldt had frequently talked about raping a woman, which Ayers had at first chalked up to guy talk. He began to wonder, however, when Woldt started pointing to certain women and suggesting, “She would make a good target.”

  There was no more wondering after the evening they drove up into the mountains and Woldt collected bowling ball-sized rocks and suggested they use them to attack a couple parked in a sports car. They would kill the man and rape the woman before also killing her, his friend said.

  Woldt referred to women as “bitches” and told him that he preferred to have sex with women who would put up a fight and “it was no fun getting it from somebody that would just give it up.” Ayers said he warned his girlfriend, Lisa, to get her sister away from Woldt and told her the truth about the rocks in the car. He was not surprised when the police found him in Seattle and he learned about the charges against Woldt.

  Ayers’s dramatic testimony was backed up by his former girlfriend, Lisa. She never liked Woldt and thought he was strange the way he was constantly “sniffing” things. He’d even sniffed her grandmother while they were all dining at a restaurant. “She was pretty put off by it.”

  She also recalled how her then-boyfriend had at first spent a lot of time with Woldt, but then began to express concerns about his “weird ideas.” The concerns increased when she found the rocks in her car and he eventually told her the truth about why they were there. Woldt, she said, used to like to watch violent movies and joke before going out with Ayers, “Let’s go rape some chicks and beat up some punks.”

  On cross-examination, Brake intimated that the sniffing was part of a mental illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, that he might have inherited from his mother. Otherwise, his comments about raping women and beating up men were “never meant to be taken seriously.”

  The prosecution ended its case by calling Dr. David Bowerman, the El Paso County Coroner, to recount the wounds suffered by Jacine Gielinski and give the official cause of death. “A stab wound to the chest which penetrated into the heart and as a result she died from internal hemorrhaging in the heart.”

  As the jury viewed the photographs Bowerman used to illustrate his points, some turned away in horror and revulsion. If anyone noticed that Peggy and Bob Luiszer were not in the courtroom, no one said anything.

  Afterward, Peggy told the Littleton Independent she was glad the second trial was under way. “It’ll be over soon. This has been going on for a long time.” But she still had a ways to go.

  Throughout the trial, the members of the press had frequently commented on how nice the Luiszers were. One story the press didn’t know had to do with Derrick Ayers. The Luiszers had met him at one of the pretrial hearings before his death and thanked him for his cooperation.

  Not long afterward, they’d learned Ayers was staying at a homeless shelter because he couldn’t afford any place else. When she saw him again, Peggy told him to call her if he ever got into a “big jam” and needed help. He never called and then they heard he’d died.

  The sad thing was that he’d died a pauper and no one had come forward to pay for a funeral, not until the Luiszers donated the money so that the former “best friend” of one of their daughter’s killers would have a decent burial in a marked grave.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “All the king’s men.”

  As promised in their opening, the defense presented experts who testified that a calcium growth near the thalamus had affected Woldt’s ability to reason and to control his behavior. The growth, along with two personality disorders, obsessive-compulsive and “dissociative state,” meant Woldt did not know what he was doing, according to the defense’s main witness, Dr. Rayna Rogers, a psychiatrist and frequent defense expert.

  It was Rogers whom Salmon’s defense expert, Meloy, had ridiculed as “outrageous” and had “switched the names” in her report that accused Salmon of being the instigator and leader. And for once, the prosecutors and the Luiszers agreed with him. They thought that what she had to say was outrageous, even though they were aware of the report she’d filed after examining Woldt nearly two years earlier.

  Rogers described Woldt as “slavish” in his willingness to “place the needs of others above his own…. He is so preoccupied with pleasing others that he generally cannot defy anyone else or express his displeasure.” This led him to give in to Salmon’s demands to help find a woman to rape, especially after Woldt’s wife insisted that he make their houseguest leave.

  “One night George and Lucas watched Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange together. Lucas became particularly excited by the rape scenes and began to suggest to George that they go and do ‘the old in and out.’ ” Woldt, she said, saw these comments as “jokes,” and began to play a “game” together with Salmon in which the two would drive around in one of their cars pretending to be searching for a woman on whom to perform “the old in and out.”

  The “game” progressed to the point of following some women in their cars for a distance, according to Rogers. The women were chose for the “game” at random. When one of the men spotted an attractive young woman, he would say, “Let’s follow her!” The game progressed to the point of carrying a kitchen knife in the car as part of the fantasy.

  In addition, she said, Lucas repeatedly implo
red George to accompany him to pornography shops where they could watch movies. Woldt recalled that Salmon was particularly fond of films that involved rape or sexual abuse of women. George did not watch those films with Lucas but rather went into a different viewing room to watch movies that were not sexually violent.

  On April 29, 1997, Woldt and Salmon were driving around the Garden of the Gods playing the “following game.” Salmon spotted a young woman jogging along the road and suggested that George run into her with his car so they could “drag her inside.”

  Woldt explained that in prior escapades they had discussed such a maneuver as part of the “in and out” fantasy. When Salmon actually suggested it, however, Woldt laughed at the “joke” and continued driving. The woman ran out of sight so Woldt drove around the park twice more “pretending to look for her as part of the game.” On the third pass around, Woldt “accidentally” collided with the young woman around a blind curve.

  He immediately stopped got out and ran to see if she was all right, according to Rogers. He offered to drive her to her vehicle or to the hospital, but the woman declined, stating that her father was a park ranger and lived nearby.

  After playing several games of pool that night, the two men departed. In the car on the way home, Salmon began crying about not having a girlfriend. George felt guilty about kicking Lucas out and felt pity for his inept friend’s sexual failure. George tried to cheer him up with a sexually suggestive joke when suddenly Lucas exclaimed, “There’s one … follow her!” He had spotted Jacine Gielinski driving home.

  As the two men abducted the young woman and then took her to the elementary school to rape her, Rogers testified that at that point Woldt “snapped” into a dissociative state, an almost out-of-body experience in which he didn’t know what he was doing.